“Every great mistake has a halfway moment, a split second when it can be recalled and perhaps remedied.”
— Pearl S. Buck
A while back, I took a quick look at the new Flow Variables feature of the Flow Designer in the hopes that the new feature might eliminate the need for my earlier effort to develop a Flow Designer Scratchpad. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to figure out how to make it work in the way that it was described in the Blog Entry that I was attempting to follow. I tried a few things on my own, but that did not work for me, either. Since I was not smart enough to figure out how to make it do what I was trying to do, I just gave up.
Since that time, though, I have upgraded my Personal Developer Instance to Rome, so I thought that it might be a good time to go back and see if anything had changed since the last time that I tried it. As it turns out, not much has changed, but during my second look I realized that if I had just kept reading the original Blog Entry that I had been following, I would have come across the way to actually pull this off. The secret is in this little icon that I never bothered to click on when I was looking at things the first time.
I still cannot simply add the +1 after the Flow Variable pill as it shows earlier in the post, but by clicking on that little icon, I can bring up the transform options and select Math -> Add from the Suggested Transforms menu. That brings up a brief dialog box where I can enter the 1 as the number that I would like to add to the current value.
Unlike my earlier attempt at manually scripting the math, this actually worked when I ran a test execution.
This is great news. Now all that I have to do is hunt down all of the places where I have used Scratchpad variables and see if I can replace them with Flow Variables. One of the Actions that I created using the Scratchpad was the Array Iterator, which was built back when the For Each Flow Logic only supported GlideRecords. Now that For Each can be used on Arrays as well, there is no longer a need for the custom built Array Iterator. I also used the Scratchpad for a Counter, something else that could now be replaced with a Flow Variable (now that I know how to make it work!). I should really hunt down the entire lot and replace them all.
That sounds like a lot of work, though, so I will probably take that that on as I crack things open for other maintenance. Still, it is good to finally be able to use the features of the product rather than these homemade concoctions. They definitely served their purpose at the time, but now that the platform has caught up with my needs, it’s definitely time to move on.
